The
controversial British historian David Irving -
once the darling of the South African Right - is involved
in a battle for the hearts and minds of future
generations over the interpretation of the
Holocaust

ANDRÉ PRETORIUS listened to the
evidence

THERE
is something moving about a man in a witness box trying to
defend his life's work against the ranged forces of a
well-groomed legal team. If that life's work is the
apparently harmless act of historiography, the onslaught
appears all the more callous. But then historiography, the
art of researching, interpreting and writing history, is not
harmless.

The question of who should be trusted as curators of
history is at the heart of a high-profile legal battle that
started in the High Court in London on Tuesday and which is
set to last three months. The British historian David
Irving is suing an American academic, Professor
Deborah Lipstadt, and her publisher, Penguin, for
libel.

Lipstadt allegedly defamed Irving in her book, Denying
the Holocaust - The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory,
when she labelled him a "Holocaust denier". Her defence to
the claim is justification: according to her, Irving's books
and speeches make him "one of the most dangerous
spokespersons for Holocaust denial".

Irving, 61 , has been an eminently controversial figure
for more than 30 years. He has been barred from Canada,
Germany and Australia
and has been fined in France and Germany
for questioning the Holocaust, which is an offence in those
countries.

He moves in extreme rightwing
circles, but on the witness stand he described himself as
a "laissez-faire liberal", although admitting his
discomfort with uncontrolled coloured immigration. He
also said he regretted the passing of the "old England"
and ventured that if the British soldiers and sailors who
won the war could see Britain now they would not have
advanced 50 yards (about 38m) up the Normandy
beaches.

Yet he claims that Lipstadt was the willing executioner
for a Jewish conspiracy to discredit him as a historian and
that her book and actions have cost him his livelihood.
Since its publication he has been unable to find a US
publisher for his biography of Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda
minister. Because Lipstadt asserts that Irving's works
"misstate, misquote, falsify statistics and falsely
attribute conclusions to reliable sources", the historical
truth of his statements will need to be assessed. A host of
star witnesses will analyse the integrity of Irving's
methods and research.

It is a fascinating and surreal exercise: in a courtroom
stacked high with documents, people in gowns and wigs argue
over the true meaning and significance of signals sent
between German generals and Nazi leaders more than 50 years
ago.

Irving, whose forensic mind and capacity for detailed
research are said to be admired by fellow historians,
represents himself. Lipstadt and Penguin are represented by
Richard Rampton QC. The parties agreed to Mr Justice
Charles Gray's suggestion to dispense with a jury,
because of the complexity of the case.

Rampton
is a bookish-looking man with the manner of a schoolmaster,
but his first cross-examination of Irving was incisive. The
importance of the case was evident as soon as that
cross-examination started on Wednesday. Rampton began by
grilling Irving on remarks he had made to a press conference
in the '90s . He had said that the biggest lie of all in the
history of World War Two was that the Nazis systematically
murdered millions of people in gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Irving retorted that he still denies that millions of Jews
were systematically killed. Gassing, he claimed, was used
only experimentally.

If he suggested the gas chamber theory was physically
impossible, it did not follow that he denied the
mass-killing of Jews. Irving said he has never disputed the
fact that somewhere between one and four million Jews were
probably killed in various ways by the Nazis.

Semantics were the swords of his verbal duel with
Rampton: what does "Holocaust" mean? For Irving, it is a
vague, imprecise and unscientific term and should be avoided
like the plague, which is why he deleted all use of the word
when he reworked
Hitler's War in 1991.

In as far as he could define it, Irving said he preferred
to call it "the tragedy that befell the Jewish people in the
war". But he thought it could also include the plight of
Gypsies, homosexuals and the citizens of Dresden, Coventry
and Hiroshima.

On the number of victims, he said the exact numbers were
in a sense irrelevant: whether it was one or six million, it
was a criminally large number.

The question of whether the killing was systematic
centres on how far knowledge of the Final Solution extended
up the Nazi hierarchy. Irving's books contend that Hitler
had been unaware of the extermination policy until late in
the war, because people like Reinhard Heydrich kept
him in the dark. He points out that there is no documentary
evidence linking Hitler to the policy.

Rampton and Irving disputed the interpretation of a
message sent by
SS chief Heinrich Himmler from Hitler's bunker, the
Wolf's Lair in East Prussia, on December 1 1941. It
instructed an SS man in Riga not to execute a trainload of 1
000 Berlin Jews.

Irving reads it as proof that Hitler disapproved of the
extermination, but Rampton contended that the special
instruction relating to one transport proved that
liquidation was par for the course. Irving, the barrister
said, read it differently to exonerate Hitler. In short, he
distorted history by seizing on a small scrap of information
to advance his agenda in the face of overwhelming evidence
to the contrary.

The arguments may cover minutiae, but the implications of
the trial are far-reaching. Whoever emerges victorious after
12 gruelling weeks in Court 37, the result will be seized
upon by extremists on either side of the argument. If Irving
were to win, the subtler nuances of the judgment in an
immensely complex case may be lost in a welter of simplistic
headlines. If Lipstadt wins, it will make life difficult
even for those historians who attempt an honest and unbiased
reassessment of one of humanity's most despicable
crimes.

The argument for an honest reevaluation is put by people
of far less controversial pedigree than Irving. Last week,
journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote in London's
Evening Standard that "the meticulous separation of fact and
record, not just from propaganda but also from sentimental
exploitation, will be a clarifying and reaffirming
thing".

"Fifty years on", Irving had
said in his opening statement, "it has become a criminal
offence to question whether Nuremberg got it right.
History is to be as defined by the four victorious powers
in the Nuremberg trials of 1945-6."

It is difficult to refute the case for a reappraisal of
the Third Reich's history in light of all the information
revealed since 1945. Any such reappraisal, if honestly done,
will always conclude that the Nazis committed one of the
worst atrocities in human history. It is the how and the why
that should be open to investigation. Yet historians
attempting this task should approach it with the utmost care
and sensitivity. In his opening statement, Irving also
lamented that "it is no longer possible to write pure
history, untrammelled and uninfluenced by politics, once one
ventures into this unpleasant field".

That should come as no surprise to any chronicler of the
Third Reich: the magnitude of the crime justifies the extra
caution. But quite irrespective of the present libel action,
what seems to be demanded by world opinion is not extra
caution, but complete conformity with a version of history.
In countries like Germany and France, this demand is
enshrined to the extent of abrogating free speech. In both
countries it is a criminal offence to question certain
aspects of the Holocaust. Irving called these laws
"questionable" and a "total infringement of the normal human
rights".

Advocates of free speech may point out that the
apotheosis of tolerance is tolerating even intolerance. On
the other hand, it may be argued that the repugnance of what
happened between 1933 and 1945 justifies such extreme
measures.

However, Irving's case is not about free speech -- after
all, he is suing, rather than being sued. It is about who
could be considered suitable custodians of historical
memory. Historians give us our picture of the past, and that
picture may be exploited in the interest of any number of
agendas.

Irving says Lipstadt destroyed his reputation as a
historian. She says she was justified in doing so because
his personal agenda made him an unsuitable trustee of the
memory of this terrible episode. In the words of Rampton,
Irving "is not historian at all, but a falsifier of history,
to put it bluntly, he is a liar".

Harsh words, a titanic struggle. The world may have
entered a new century but the heritage of the last remains
painfully present. The history of the destruction of
European Jewry is one of the most difficult components of
that heritage. More than mere personal reputations are at
stake in Court 73 - the prize is nothing less than
curatorship of that dark past.

Pretorius is a South African law
student in London

Suggestion: Did this journalist accurately reflect
the day's proceedings? Check the
day's transcript and then...

Website
fact: The stamina
of the defence team is aided by a six million
dollar fund provided by the American Jewish
Committee, which enables them to pay 21 lawyers and
"experts"; the experts like Evans, Longerich, etc.
earn £750 (DM2500) per day (while the
defence's star legal team is paid considerably
more). Nobody is paying for Mr Irving, who has been
fighting this Existenzkampf for three whole years.
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